Payment Gateway Setup
10 min read
Alonah collects deposits and payments directly inside the WhatsApp conversation, into your own payment account. Setting it up is a one-time choice of payment provider (Tap or Stripe), plus a few policy decisions around deposits and refunds.
Choose how you receive money
Customers always pay your own account, never Alonah's, and the AI can't go live until one is connected. In the Gulf, connect Tap: on top of cards it adds mada, KNET, Benefit, STC Pay and Apple Pay, depending on what your Tap account has enabled. In the US, UK, EU, Canada and Switzerland you can instead onboard with Stripe Connect through a hosted flow, and the platform never touches your bank details.
If you already run your own Stripe or Tap account and prefer to use your own keys directly, that's available too (when your platform operator has enabled it), payments then process entirely on your own account.
Set your deposit rules
Decide whether a booking requires no deposit, a fixed amount, or a percentage, and you can override that at the branch level or per individual service. An automatic discount for returning customers can be layered on top if you want to reward repeat business.
Configure cancellations and refunds
Choose a tiered refund schedule (e.g. full refund if cancelled 48h+ ahead, partial refund inside that window) or a simple full/none cutoff. Once set, cancellations are refunded automatically according to this policy, through the same account the original charge went through, no manual processing required.
Handle invoices and manual payments
Beyond bookings, the dashboard generates invoices automatically from quotes and memberships (or lets you create one manually), each with a payment link if unpaid, with VAT calculated and shown per invoice. Staff can also mark an invoice paid manually, for example for a cash payment, without the customer needing to pay online at all.